Plans B to ???

Well, we now have the breakdown of cost from the original tenders and it's interesting how much the different areas vary. If you add up the lowest cost offer in each section, it comes in well below our maximum spend. If you add up the maxima, it comes to twice that! You probably can't do a straight choice as there's doubtless some overlap but it's a surprise that it's all that much. So it's clear that there is significant margin for error. The architect has gone back to the two most-likely-to tenderers and asked them to have a look at the big areas of problem difference but it's hard to see how he will get it back on track with them. Meanwhile we have a meeting with a contractor that works with our QS next week to look over his schedule and see if we can get to a sensible negotiated price based on the QS report and cost-saving opportunities. It's still not clear to me exactly what's driving the overall cost up - is the design simply too difficult a shape and therefore embodying complexity and cost? At present it's not obvious to me that the architect is feeling the same pain over driving the cost down that we are!